VMTwatch.org looks at the controversial healthcare businesses run by D.C. contractor Solanges Vivens and is part of an effort to stop VMT’s misuse of public funds and improve the care it offers District residents. Read more

Who Is Solanges Vivens?

Solanges Vivens is the CEO and sole owner of VMT Long Term Care Management Inc., a controversial healthcare company that does significant business with Washington, D.C.

Vivens has grown wealthy running VMT — she lives in a $1.3 million home in D.C.’s exclusive Chevy Chase neighborhood — yet she pays poverty wages to many of her caregivers. The U.S. Department of Labor found that from 2006 to 2008 VMT underpaid its workers more than $1.7 million in health and welfare benefits.

VMT consists of at least three interconnected healthcare businesses: a nursing home management division, a home health agency and a healthcare education center. All of them have a troubled history:

Vivens used to manage two D.C.-owned nursing homes, but she lost the contract at Washington Center for Aging Services (WCAS) in 2010. The city had determined that VMT wrongly spent $107,000 on an anti-worker campaign at WCAS.

Caregivers at Vivens’ home healthcare agency had long complained about poverty pay and grueling working conditions and in 2008 voted to form a union. Since then, Vivens has refused to settle a fair first contract

VMT’s LPN training program was shut down by the D.C. Board of Nursing in 2003. Vivens restarted the LPN program under a different name in 2005 and today its students have the highest failure rate in D.C. and the nursing board may shut it down again.

A public information project of the caregivers of 1199SEIU. Copyright 2011, VMTwatch.org. All rights reserved.